Young Monk To Talk About His Father's Legacy

RIFFS - JAZZ NOTES

February 16, 2006|By OWEN McNALLY; SPECIAL TO THE COURANT

T.S. Monk, a producer and key player in the release of the sensational album ``Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall,'' speaks about that momentous disc Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at the Artists Collective.

You can't get much more inside the music than T.S. Monk. The son of the legendary Thelonious Monk, he grew up immersed in the world of modern jazz. As an adult and independent spirit, he has carved a widely varied, distinguished musical career for himself.

T.S., 56, is a drummer, composer, band leader, noted jazz educator, chairman of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz and founder and CEO of Thelonious Records.

As a young man, T.S. was a drummer for his father, the iconoclastic jazz genius, pianist, composer and band leader.

T.S. will perform with his trio in the Artists Collective's cozy atrium, an intimate nook ideal for good conversation and jazz.

The re-surfacing of the recording of Monk and Trane playing together at Carnegie Hall on Nov. 29, 1957, was one of the major stories in the jazz world for 2005 -- or, for that matter, any year.

Taped by the Voice of America, the stunning music was never broadcast. Instead it was filed and forgotten among a massive collection of VOA recordings stored in the Library of Congress.

Purely by chance, the tapes were unearthed from among 50,000 boxes early in 2005 by Larry Appelbaum, a recording lab supervisor at the Library of Congress.

To thunderous universal acclaim, ``Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall'' was released later in 2005 under the aegis of Thelonious Records (T.S.'s record company) and Blue Note Records.

If you haven't heard T.S. speak, be prepared to enjoy an eloquent storyteller and articulate, evangelical defender of the faith in jazz as the great American art form.

In a recent telephone interview from his home in Orange, N.J., T.S. recalled how listening to the historic Monk/Trane recording gave him insight into events he had witnessed but was puzzled by as a child in his father's home.

``This was at a time when Thelonious wasn't working in clubs because he didn't have a cabaret card,'' T.S. says. (Because of a trumped-up drug charge, Monk lost his card, a document musicians had to have in order to work in New York City clubs with liquor licenses.)

``So my mother was working. I was about 6 and had a younger sister. Thelonious was home doing the Mr. Mom thing -- even before there was such a term -- doing the cooking, cleaning, changing diapers and all that stuff.

``We were living at 243 West 63d, which everybody probably knows was a tiny apartment with the piano in the kitchen. So there was really nowhere to go there for a kid like me who was always opening the door to let in someone like Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins, Art Blakey, Max Roach, Horace Silver or John Coltrane.

``I remember, as a kid, this guy, Coltrane, coming in. He and my dad would go straight to work in the kitchen, Coltrane with his horn, my father at his piano.

``I remember my father would be on this guy like a real intense thing. I didn't know what was going on except that Daddy was always saying, `Come on, man, play this! Play that! Don't worry about this!'

``It wasn't until I heard this recording that I realized what I had been witness to because in our house my father was re-arranging this cat's brain in these kitchen seminars. And the wonderful thing is that from the second Coltrane went out on his own, he was never hesitant to say, `Monk turned me around.'''

Still celebrating the Grammy Award it won Feb. 8, the Turtle Island String Quartet focuses its attention on the legacy of John Coltrane and his composition, ``A Love Supreme,'' Friday at 8 p.m. at the University of Connecticut's von der Mehden Rectal Hall on the Storrs campus.

The innovative quartet, which plunges headfirst into eclectic, alternative string music, appears as part of the Jorgensen Center for the performing Arts' Jazz Dog Cafe Series at von der Mehden, 875 Coventry Road.

TISQ won the Grammy for the best classical crossover album, ``Four + Four,'' a collaboration with the traditional string chamber group, the Ying Quartet. The Ying Quartet shared the Grammy honors for the album, which was released by Telarc.